School Idol Tomodachi

Feb. 2, 2015 - current

The project started as a simple cards collection tracker, similar to [MyAnimeList](http://myanimelist.net/) or [iCheckMovies](http://icheckmovies.com/). It was meant to be a personal tool, so it was quite a surprise when it reached 500 users on its first week of existence!
Its fast growing popularity motivated db0 to pivot the project and make it suit the needs of its users, and that's how it also became a full-featured social network.
It's been made in Python using **Django**, + Bootstrap, LESS and jQuery for the front-end. The first version was published one month after the beginning of the development.
Through this project, db0 acquired very important professional skills, such as:
- **Community management and social media**. The rapid growth of the site was controlled via a [10k+ Twitter account](https://twitter.com/schoolidolu), a large [Reddit community](https://www.reddit.com/r/SchoolIdolFestival/), a [Facebook group](https://www.facebook.com/groups/293090280852174/) and lots of one-one user interactions to build trust and generate ambassadors.
- **Scalability of the code architecture and system administration**. With over 15 000 unique visitors a day and peaks of thousands of users at the same time, understanding the "behind the scenes" of Django, python and the AWS stack became a need. Code optimization and caching had to be implemented at all the levels of the site's technical stack.